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'Tips From Smokers' Campaign Beat Expectations

Real-life depictions of tobacco's devastating health consequences moved many Americans to quit, study found

WebMD News from HealthDay

WebMD News Archive

By Dennis Thompson

HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Sept. 9 (HealthDay News) -- A hard-hitting national smoking-cessation campaign -- the first ever to be federally funded -- proved very successful, essentially tripling the number of smokers that officials hoped would be inspired to quit, according to a new study.

The researchers estimated that 200,000 Americans were motivated to quit for the duration of the campaign or longer. Many more at least tried to stop smoking.

"Our goal was to get half a million quit attempts, and the study findings show it was more like a million and a half," said Dr. Tim McAfee, director of the Office on Smoking and Health, part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC's national Tips From Former Smokers campaign kicked off in March 2012 and lasted three months, reaching out to both the nearly 45 million current smokers in the United States and their friends and family.

The $54 million effort featured testimonials from former smokers who had suffered amputations, heart attacks, strokes, and head and neck surgery because of their addiction.

Ads ran on television and radio, in print, and online. Along with the testimonials, the CDC ads guided people to national smoking-cessation telephone helplines and online resources.

To assess the campaign's impact, a team led by McAfee surveyed more than 5,000 randomly selected Americans before and after the ads ran. About three-fifths were smokers, and the rest were nonsmokers.

Three of four people surveyed saw at least one of the campaign's TV ads, the CDC found. The ads prompted a 12 percent increase in smokers who tried to quit, and more than one in 10 who tried to quit had remained tobacco-free.

The new findings appeared online Sept. 9 in the journal The Lancet.

Extrapolating these findings to the total United States population, the CDC estimates that 1.6 million smokers tried to quit due to the campaign, and more than 200,000 remained tobacco-free by the end of the campaign. The CDC expects that about 100,000 of the smokers who quit will be able to stay away from tobacco for good.